Contrary to earlier reports, director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin will not be filming two Independence Day sequels back-to-back, but have confirmed the film's 2016 release date. Independence Day 2 is currently in development and Dean Devlin recently sat down with Nerd Report to discuss their plans for the highly anticipated sci-fi sequel.
“We decided just to do one first to make sure that people like where we’re going,” Devlin said. “If that works well, there’s an ability to do some world building which would be really fun and interesting to do. I think Roland and everybody felt, let’s just make sure 20 years later that people still are interested. I think in our case, we started to feel that maybe we were being a little bit arrogant by assuming that we could do two movies. We said you know what, let’s scale it down. Let’s first make sure that it works for everyone.”
Regarding Will Smith's potential return to the franchise, unfortunately Devlin confirms Smith won't be returning:
“I’m not sure of the reasons why Will ultimately decided not to do it. You’d have to ask him. I think he was just at a place where he did seriously consider it. We had a lot of meetings with him, but at the end of the day he decided that doing this wasn’t right for him.”
Since the news hit that 20th Century Fox had greenlit the Independence Day sequel, it was still unknown whether or not Emmerich would in fact return to direct the film. Devlin now confirms that Ronald will in fact direct Independence Day 2:
“Roland is back to direct. He developed a new script with a couple young writers and the new script is fantastic. We’re very excited about shooting.”
Source: Nerd Report
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